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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28313037">Cold and Broken (Hallelujah)</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Her_Madjesty/pseuds/Her_Madjesty'>Her_Madjesty</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Much Ado About Nothing (1993)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Unresolved Emotional Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Unresolved Tension, strangers to lovers to strangers</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 15:54:43</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,628</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28313037</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Her_Madjesty/pseuds/Her_Madjesty</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Say the story starts in advance.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Hero/Don John (Much Ado About Nothing)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>18</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Cold and Broken (Hallelujah)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/perennial/gifts">perennial</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Heard the Pentatonix cover while I was wrapping presents, got the idea, wrote it at 4am. Not edited in the slightest as of 12/25.</p><p>Merry Christmas!</p><p>Administrative note: this fic is written in the style of a Chaucerian format as proposed by anghraine on Tumblr. Each of the seven sections is composed of seven sentences, as proposed in the original challenge, issued <a href="https://anghraine.tumblr.com/post/145320294168/chaucer-meme">here</a>.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>I. The Minor Fall, The Major Lift</p><p> </p><p>Say the story starts in advance.</p><p>Say it is a long night, a summer’s night, with the horizon still lit up all orange and beautiful. And say there’s a party, like there’s always a party, celebrating the lives of those men about to go and die in another man’s war.</p><p>And say there’s a girl.</p><p>He watches her move across the floor of her father’s home, lit up in that off-gold light of sunset; he, a man who might have claimed to have never wanted for anything but who would never do so, knowing it a lie.</p><p>(His other wants – tangible: a villa, a vineyard, his picture in a hall of portraits; his half-brother’s sideways smile as they share a joke between them inside of one at his expense. But this want – Hero; here, now, all-consuming; the way the light hits her hair and the night draws her in and the dances draw them closer, like planets circling overhead - is new.)</p><p> </p><p>II. Her Beauty in the Moonlight Overthrew You</p><p> </p><p>And the thing is –</p><p>say she looks back.</p><p>Because at the end of the day, Hero dreams of a soldier. She is young and guileless, but old in the way Beatrice has taught her to be old; she looks between men and graces them all with her smile, not knowing which, if any, may bear her away from this place or if she wants to be borne away at all.</p><p>But she can look across her father’s floor, her hair still wet from her bath, and feel a set of steady eyes on her shoulders; feel them caressing her cheek from that great distance.</p><p>Hero does not think on the honor of her house, then, or what a future wedding may look like, or what exists beyond this night and this night alone.</p><p>Instead, she meets two burning coals on the edge of a summer night, and she smiles back at them; smiles with the whole of her body in an offering to a man who has yet to make his fearsome reputation.</p><p>(That smile wins her the day in the same breath it cuts him to the quick; he will draw back as she draws near, and it will be her hands around his wrists; her breaths matching his heartbeats; her guiding footsteps to take them away from that party and into the quiet of the garden.)</p><p> </p><p>III. She Tied You to The Kitchen Chair</p><p> </p><p>The thing about preparing to go away to die is this –</p><p>there is no point in talking.</p><p>So they don’t.</p><p>What Hero knows is this: here is a man who looks at her with dark eyes and none – none – of the propriety and reluctance that the smooth-faced boys in her father’s foyer do. Here is a man not occupied with Beatrice, Hero’s first and only love.</p><p>(And what Don John knows is this: this girl – this woman is the first to look at him without seeing his father; without seeing his half-brother or his station or his muddled history. She knows so little of him that she has no opinion, and it is the lack thereof that colors his lips; that she presses into his skin.</p><p>He sighs his worship into the curve of her neck and readies himself at her altar; in every gasp he rings from her, he can hear his salvation.)</p><p> </p><p>IV. She Broke Your Throne; She Cut Your Hair</p><p> </p><p>Hero does not know the intricacies of men and women; knows in her heart that, come Sunday, she may regret what she has done; but feels, in the instant, only the heat between her legs and the thrum of this strange man against her soul.</p><p>And so Don John teaches her.</p><p>He lies on his back in that forgiving garden and lets her sink onto him; lets her adjust to the thickness of him – but only after an hour or two has passed; only after his fingers have mapped out her skin; only after his shoulder has served as her gag to better obscure her screaming. His fingers are dripping with her, but he does not care; her body is wreathed in moonlight, and there is no one in this garden to find them.</p><p>She settles on him, her thighs shaking, until he can’t help but beg her to move. And then, her smile –</p><p>she rocks her hips against his –</p><p>he slams his head back into the dirt –</p><p>his mouth falls open in prayer –</p><p>and she gasps –</p><p>and she tightens –</p><p>and he –</p><p>and she –</p><p>and they –</p><p>(The stars watch overhead, the perfect ambivalent voyeurs, while inside the villa, another future is being planned.)</p><p> </p><p>V. I’ve Seen This Room and I’ve Walked This Floor</p><p> </p><p>It is the first time.</p><p>But it is not the last.</p><p>Don Pedro and his bastard brother remain in the villa for a week, preparing supplies and men and discussing possible strategies with the old guard of Messina.</p><p>John gets little sleep.</p><p>It is the first time he thanks the angels for his strange invisibility; it is this gift that lets him look at her over dinner; that lets them wander into the gardens one after another but that brings his name to her lips and her lips alone when he brings her over the edge between the shrubbery and the grape vines.</p><p>(And Hero comes to breakfast with bags beneath her eyes and a secret, guilty smile tucked into the corner of her mouth. What her mind denies her body wants, and she chases it, swears that in the days to come, she will forgo this blessed sin; will forget this man with the stubble on his chin and his hot, wet tongue and sparks he sets alight inside of her.)</p><p> </p><p>VI. I Used to Live Alone Before I Knew You</p><p> </p><p>But war does not wait for lovers.</p><p>When the week is up, Don John is among the men to go; one of many to face a contingent of men his half-brother believes to be a threat to his power.</p><p>(What Don Pedro does not know, beyond the cries that fall from Hero’s lips – no woman can yet tame the hatred in Don John’s heart; that his departure from this villa, this vineyard, that garden and this woman will only stir the fire in the bastard’s chest that will eventually drive him to rebel.)</p><p>In the end, he does not bid Hero goodbye.</p><p>Their last night, instead, is spent in the company of flowers – and he wants to swear something to her there; anything, whatever she might ask for.</p><p>But Hero does not ask him for anything.</p><p>Instead, on their final night, she presses kiss after kiss to his sun-soaked skin – and he lets her; holds her hands in his as she cradles his cheeks but bites his tongue when she whispers her prayers; when she tells him that she’ll wait eagerly for his return, not knowing that she imbues her voice in his head as she does, damning him –</p><p>Damning her.</p><p> </p><p>VII. Love is Not a Victory March</p><p> </p><p>He is injured in his own rebellion; when he wakes from the field, it is with manacles on his wrist in a field hospital with his half-brother standing over him.</p><p>They return to Messina some two years later, the both of them still recovering.</p><p>And the story goes on like this: rumors make it to the villa before their arrival, both of the princes to come and of the history that separates them from the men that they used to be. Riding up to the gate, there is a gaggle of laughter from all but John, who looks at that garden and those vines and that villa and feels something like dread in the depths of his heart.</p><p>For there to greet them is Leonato and his daughter, the both of them dressed in white against the heat of the day.</p><p>And Hero – does not look at him.</p><p>She has eyes only for Claudio, John’s replacement at his half-brother’s side, and it stings; by God, does it sting to see that boy take her hands in his; does it burn to keep their secrets on the inside of his cheek as he watches them wander the gardens together, Hero’s cheeks as pale as a virgin maid’s (and he has done this; ruined her; ruined him; ruined the both of them and left himself to this fate, the one where her eyes glance over him except for when he commands them – only when he screams and listens to the monster in his heart that wants to see the whole of the world burn down around him).</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>VIII. How to Shoot Somebody Who Outdrew You</p><p> </p><p>(So at the end of the day, he does it again.</p><p>There is the wedding. There is the groom. There is his half-brother and her father and there is Hero standing in the doorway, her eyes bright and unseeing as she walks towards the wrong man at the end of the aisle.</p><p>He stands aside as Claudio casts her down; as his half-brother spreads his vitriol through the attending crowd.</p><p>And she looks at him –</p><p>but he does not speak on her behalf; damns neither her nor him but rather some fool in between the two; some fool and the woman they both know was not her.</p><p>And her eyes, when Claudio storms out of the chapel, are bright with unshed tears; but they are shining, too, shining with a fire deep within that could set him alight; that could keep him warm on the long nights away from Messina, when there’s nothing left in his memory but her – her fingers, her taste, and this scene, all of it choking him like a hand around his throat.)</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Edits, 12/26/20:</p><p>1) Oh god, this is a song fic, isn't it?<br/>2) Now that the edits have been appropriately applied throughout the piece -- proper Merry Christmas, perennial, and the rest of you lot. &lt;3 Sending good cheer your way as 2020 comes to a close.</p><p>Edit, 4/10/21: I'm now on Twitter! Come and find me and my various other platforms <a href="https://twitter.com/HMadjesty">here.</a></p></blockquote></div></div>
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